Single Hauz

Like an inhabitable billboard, the Single Hauz – by Poland’s front architects – proposes cantilevering domestic living space from a central mast. The house can then be installed above a variety of ground conditions, from the middle of a meadow to an urban core. Personally… I’d put it in a lake.

The cool thing is that I’ve actually spent the last 11 months of my life staring up at some of the Herculean billboard structures out here in Los Angeles; they tower over intersections on streets from Venice to Sepulveda and often seem as large as houses. But how much weight could a billboard carry?

Could you build a house up there? Could you use the mast-and-cantilever model for other types of architectural structures, whether those are single-family houses – whole cul-de-sacs lined with modernist billboard homes! – or even restaurants and public libraries? The Single Hauz shows how beautiful the effect could be.

34 thoughts on “Single Hauz”

I love love love it! Now if you want to bring this project to a whole other level, imagine actually combining real billboard adds to this project. The inhabitant of the house could pay off his house by selling his façade in order to advertize. Idealistic, utopist,ironic and serioulsy twisted solution for low-cost housing?

i’d like to point out there is a project by a french architect, didier Faustino, also centered on billboardhouses. He focussed on the voyeuristic properties inbedded in the billboard (of course the billboard is placed on the best viewing spot).

it’s cool and creative, but how the residents access to the electricity, gas, water and sewerage,etc? and it’s not so friendly to disables:)is that possible to expand the size of the house?anyway, it looks fantastic.

To me, what this suggests is that it’s time to engage in a little punk politics: Billboard squats.

Especially those ones that have two signs at an angle on the same stalk. The space between cries out for improvement. A couple platforms built from scavenged materials, blue tarp and/or parachute for shade and shelter, hammocks to sleep in, electricity stolen from the lighting system so you can cook and run a space heater if you need to… Before long it’s something out of William Gibson.

Get ahold of the maintenance schedules and collapse everything down once a month before The Man shows up.

“Single Hauz — a kind of a manifest, proposal of a house/shelter for aWestern Worlder. The “basic unit of society”, as marriage is called,isn’t an only model of life nowadays. As a detached, single occupant houseunit, Single Hauz fills a kind of a void — lack of housing proposals forso called “singles”. Inspired by a billboard, it is designed as an objectfittable in almost any place on Earth. It’s especially predisposed for anylocalization with interesting landscape. The forest, sea, lake, mountains,meadows – but, on the other hand, just by the main street of a city.”

cool, but the “hooch” has a floating, single point foundation- not dug several leagues deep. With cables to surrounding trees, or other stable objects, the hooch stands as the true metaphor for a small footprint- literally, and figuratively.http://www.tropical-treehouse.com

Quilian, I agree – this doesn’t solve very much in the way of infrastructure and sprawl (unless you build thousands of these things, more or less overlapping in a very small area), but it’s a creative use of structural masts…

Although you could potentially side-step the electricity issue using solar panels.

Great to see someone is making an effort in producing accessible homes…. i guess you could always use a rope.Aside from that there are a few regulations that would not allow that to be build where i am…..

I’m thinking of real billboards and it seems to be that the supporting post runs all the way between the board sections. Have to check this out since it would really constrict what you could do in the center of the “building”.

I think it's all in the way you frame it. A few struts, a couple anchors, and it looks viable. I would think that they would be ideal for previously hard-to-use land in rocky terrain, with a minimum of elevation, and maximizing the view. Central column provides plenty of hiding space for utility routing, and even water storage, solar mass, or waste tanks for filtration or such.

I would like to know how it would cost?? and yes, i found a way of it being water and sewage friendly! you just have to build it on 2 poles, so that on one pole, the water passes through it, and the other, it's the sewage… anyways, i would reeaaally like someone to estimate the price of this, because it says no wheres on any websites…